The Nerd Who’s Trying to Save Detroit

It hasn’t hurt that, for the first time since 1948, Republicans control all the levers of power in Michigan, from the legislature to the attorney general’s office. “He’s benefited from having a Republican House and Republican Senate, no question,” says Ronna Romney McDaniel. She is a Michigan resident, the niece of Mitt Romney, and a committeewoman to the national Republican Party. “It’s definitely made his job easier.”

Until last year, when it succumbed to public and legal pressure, Snyder also had a secretive reserve called the NERD Fund. It was registered as a “social welfare nonprofit”—although it paid for public services and even the salary of Snyder’s right-hand man, it did not have to disclose donors. By accepting unlimited anonymous funds, Snyder was transferring the “dark money” tactics of political campaigns into the day-to-day work of public service.

Snyder’s critics on the left dismiss the idea that he’s a new kind of conservative. He doubled the limits on campaign contributions and erased the limit on the number of charter schools in the state—a troubling development to many, in light of a year-long investigation by the Detroit Free Press that exposes how lax regulation and for-profit management companies are taking advantage of students. Michigan’s roads are in terrible shape—even before the devastating winter, one-third of the highways and major roads were rated in poor condition by the state’s Department of Transportation. But even though roads were a priority of Snyder’s, the Republican-controlled legislature was unable to pass any repair bill before leaving for summer vacation in June.

Senate Minority Leader Gretchen Whitmer wrote an op-ed calling it a “failure of leadership.” “For the last three years, Governor Snyder has vowed to fix the road problem — pegged at nearly $2 billion annually — but he instead gave that money away in tax handouts to large corporations that have done little to spur the economy and nothing to improve our roads,” she wrote.

Most significant, liberals say, is Snyder signing “right-to-work” into law in 2012, which eliminated the requirement that workers in unionized sectors pay union fees as a condition of employment. (Opponents call the law “right to work for less.”) Right to work was a law written in haste, without any public hearings, after Snyder had long said that the issue was not on his agenda. It quickly became otherwise after a 2012 ballot initiative failed that would have enshrined collective bargaining into Michigan’s constitution. Not content with the victory, Republican lawmakers scurried to seize the moment by putting right to work on Snyder’s desk. With a stroke of his pen, labor was enfeebled in Michigan, a state that was once its bastion.

“He’s cut from the same cloth as Scott Walker and John Kasich,” says Mark Schauer, the former U.S. congressman who is Snyder’s Democratic challenger in the governor’s race. “I think, candidly, he has tried to keep his head down while his legislature is putting extreme bill after extreme bill on his desk. But of course, they don’t become law until he signs them.”

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But painting Snyder as a conservative ideologue won’t be easy. And here, his Detroit “bailout” could even prove useful.

When he talks about the grand bargain, it’s almost as if Snyder is an accountant again, weighing each side of the ledger. “There are what I would describe as clear factual economic reasons to do it,” he says. Reducing litigation costs is one of those reasons. So is the reduction in social safety net costs—“If we didn’t have the grand bargain, more people would fall into poverty,” Snyder says. “It’s one of the things I insisted on.”

Finally—and this is the swing-for-the-fences reasoning that Snyder hopes will resonate with voters across the state—it comes down to marketing. “When you talk with people outside the state of Michigan, no matter where you’re from, you do find that you spend the first few minutes talking about Detroit, usually the negative aspects,” Snyder says. “With this settlement resolving the bankruptcy, we will find for the first time probably in some of our lifetimes, we can start on a very positive note.”